


Gilded

by Miss_M



Category: Little Women (2019)
Genre: Artists, Christmas, F/M, Family, Flashbacks, Gen, Marriage, Mention of Canonical Character Death, Post-Canon, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 10:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27969209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Amy gets validation from an unexpected source.
Relationships: Theodore Laurence/Amy March
Comments: 26
Kudos: 79
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Gilded

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mustlovemustypages](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustlovemustypages/gifts).



> I own nothing.

Mr. Laurence sent his carriage to meet them at the train station in Concord. They’d left New York two months earlier to visit friends in Boston, and were delayed in their departure therefrom by Amy moving more slowly than usual – and needing just as much time to pack as she ever did – then, just when Laurie flung open the door and a servant finished buttoning Amy’s boots for her, they were delayed still more by the arrival of Mr. Laurence’s telegram scolding them for taking the train instead of hiring a cab to convey them to Concord.

_In Amy’s delicate condition STOP reckless STOP carriage waiting at station STOP_

“He manages to harrumph in a telegram,” Laurie commented when they finally piled into the cab that would bring them to the station in Boston.

Amy settled into the seat and rested her hands on her belly, which bulged before her like a veritable Christmas pudding, even under her plaid travel bodice with its whalebone inserts. She craned her head so she could keep an eye on the servants arranging the luggage and the wrapped presents. All of Amy’s presents – the pearl brooch for Meg, the gold-rimmed reading spectacles for Marmee, the toys for Demi and Daisy, the astrakhan gloves for Mr. Laurence, and the rest – had been bought with money Amy had earned herself. Just knowing that warmed her as well as a foot stove.

By the time they were dressing for dinner, Amy’s joints were swollen, she felt hot even after she’d changed out of her thick travel plaids, and on the whole she was inclined to agree with Mr. Laurence on the relative merits of private carriages versus first-class train compartments. When she complained to Laurie, he kissed her in sympathy but couldn’t resist teasing her that the train had been much faster – in a carriage, they would have been on the road still, and night came on early that time of year.

“Imagine: a carriage rumbling through the woods, the hungry wolves keeping pace,” he intoned with a sonorous laugh like a music-hall villain. Amy slapped him on the arm with the fringe of her Indian shawl.

She forewent a corset and wore instead a loose silk gown the pale pink color of the inside of a shell, with a double frill along the hem, and over that a silk tunic in a deeper shade of pink, decorated with blue Chinese willows and mountains, with deep-blue and sea-green embroidery running along the hem and the loose, short sleeves.

The tunic was her own design.

> > After a whole year of convincing herself that she did not regret the abandonment of her painterly ambitions, Amy and Laurie had attended a ball where Amy got into a long conversation with a balding man sporting a monocle and a vaguely Germanic accent. He had been very critical of the hostess’ taste in interior decoration, and Amy had agreed with him a tad too loudly perhaps, for people had turned and looked at them, but she hadn’t got to talk to anyone but Laurie about anything remotely connected to art in _so long_.
>> 
>> Amy sketched out her own vision for the room. The man took off his monocle, peered at her shortsightedly, and asked her if she would like a job.
>> 
>> Amy balked. Her parents had taught her to reject all prejudice, but in her head she could almost hear Aunt March ridiculing Amy’s interlocutor for his lack of manners, his shopkeeper uncouthness, _only a foreigner would act this way…_
>> 
>> “I am a married woman,” Amy blurted out, thinking that this covered everything there was to be said, but also sounded ridiculous. She wished Jo had been there, she’d have known just what to say.
>> 
>> The man offered her the kind of deep bow she had not seen since she’d left Europe, as well as a simple, elegant calling card from a beautiful silver case. “If your husband has a good eye as well, I haff a job for him too.”
>> 
>> The business card read:
>> 
>> _Mr. John Rubinstein_
>> 
>> _Fine China ~ Glassware ~ Silks and Notions for Ladies_
>> 
>> A respectable Broadway address. The embossed cream parchment solid in Amy’s hand. She felt like she’d been entrusted with a secret.
>> 
>> Amy rarely lacked self-confidence, except when it came to her art and the talent she had and the ability she knew she lacked. She prevaricated for two days before she decided to visit Mr. Rubinstein’s office without telling Laurie beforehand. Then she recalled that secrets could be a slow poison, and she told Laurie of the funny conversation she’d had at Margaret van Royce’s ball, and showed him the card, and finally, abandoning all bravado, asked Laurie what he’d do in her shoes.
>> 
>> “It’s not like we need the money.” Amy attempted a laugh – she never would have imagined herself uttering those words while she was growing up – but it came out hollow.
>> 
>> Laurie examined Mr. Rubinstein’s card, then he examined his wife. “As you have occasion to remind me, I am an idle fellow, happy to flit like a butterfly from one interesting thing to the next. But you, my love, you want roots and purpose. Why not go and see what terms he offers you?”

“Is that one of yours?” Laurie asked her, running the fingers of his free hand down Amy’s embroidered sleeve as they descended the great staircase at Amy’s now-customary slow ( _stately_ , she insisted) pace.

Amy clung to his arm and negotiated the polished oak steps one at a time. “It is.”

“The colors are beautiful,” Laurie said unprompted, and Amy felt herself blush. He could still make her feel all of twelve again. She blamed the blazing gas jets lining the staircase.

Mr. James Laurence was too much of an old-fashioned gentleman to comment out loud on Amy’s _delicate condition_ or her lack of a corset, and Amy both was grateful for his tact and relished her own wickedness in being so provoking, for she had come to love Mr. Laurence as much as all her sisters did. Mr. Laurence sat at the head of the long table in the dark-paneled dining room, Laurie on his grandfather’s right and Amy on his left, a fire crackling in the fireplace and the upper lips of the servants lined up beside the door glistening with sweat. Amy smiled at them in sympathy, grateful that it was not only her pregnancy which made her feel so hot. Her face was burning, and Laurie wasn’t even teasing her!

They were still on the soup when Laurie brought up the subject of the child’s name.

“If it’s a boy, we shall name him James Theodore,” Laurie said.

“Flattery won’t make your inheritance any bigger than it already is,” Mr. Laurence said in his stern way, which was paper-thin to Amy’s perceptions after all those years.

“It’s not flattery, it’s tradition,” Amy corrected him gently.

Mr. Laurence glanced at her, his eyebrows bristling but a smile hovering in the corner of his mouth. “And if it’s a girl? Good Lord, don’t let her be Gertrude. My dear wife hated the name. I was only ever allowed to call her Gertie.”

 _Just like Jo_ , Amy thought. She’d never known this about Laurie’s grandmother, and judging from Laurie’s expression, neither had he.

“Lucy, so that her life may be filled with light,” Amy said.

“Lucy? Hm.” Mr. Laurence spooned up some soup. Amy watched him closely for a reaction.

“Yes, we thought that ‘Lucia’ would just make the other debutantes tease her,” Laurie said lightly, but he was pale. He pronounced his mother’s name the Italian way.

Mr. Laurence looked up from his soup plate and fixed Laurie with a cold stare. “It is a fine thing to honor one’s parents,” he said.

Laurie’s knuckles tightened around his spoon. Amy would have reached across and touched his hand, but the table was too wide.

“Lucy Elizabeth,” she interjected. She met and held Mr. Laurence’s eye. “Her full name will be Lucy Elizabeth Laurence.”

Secretly, she was certain the baby would be a girl. Between Laurie’s family and her own, the girls had the boys licked. She couldn’t touch her husband but she did take the old man’s hand, for his face was the picture of grief.

“Not Elizabeth Lucy?” he whispered.

Amy shook her head. “If she were named Elizabeth, I would always worry.” _That she would die young._

Mr. Laurence squeezed Amy’s hand – she felt the thick veins, the dry skin – and after a moment, he reached his other hand out to Laurie, who accepted it, his pale cheeks coloring.

“You will always worry regardless,” Mr. Laurence said. “But I shall pray for her, and for you, my dear. And for you,” he told Laurie.

> > “Oh, an immaculate conception?” Jo had teased when Amy’d brought the news of her pregnancy on her last visit to Concord and mentioned that she would likely give birth at Christmas. “I should write a play about it. _Amy Laurence, the Fair Virgin of Concord_.”
>> 
>> “Jo!” Meg covered her face and laughed, and Amy threw the ball of yarn she’d just finished winding for Marmee at Jo’s head.
>> 
>> Amy did not begrudge Jo’s occasional teasing about her marriage – much – no more than Laurie resented Amy’s teasing of him. Her tendency to scold him had never entirely dissipated, and though Laurie rarely took offense, Amy disliked herself when she poked at him too sharply. In a way, she and Laurie and Jo were connected by ties stronger than blood or marriage. Their past bound them together like stalks of wheat in a sheaf. Whenever any two among them were together, the third was there as well, a shadow sitting with them at the table, undressing with them for bed, reliving the same memories, the same joys, the same hurts. Though she never confessed it to anyone, Amy was pleased that at last their lives were diverging a bit – hers from Jo’s, Laurie’s from Jo’s – so that new memories might grow inside those gaps.
>> 
>> “Will you have the baby here?” Meg asked, excited at the prospect. She’d delivered the twins with Marmee and Hannah’s help.
>> 
>> “Not _here_ here,” Amy said carefully, fearful of disappointing Meg. “Mr. Laurence will set up a nursery at his house and get the best doctor from Boston.”
>> 
>> “Very prudent,” Jo said with mock solemnity. “Mr. Laurence’s house is much more comfortable than a manger.”

After dinner, there being no other ladies present and the weather having turned too foul for an evening visit to the March home, Amy lay down in the bedroom set aside for her and Laurie. Laurie and Mr. Laurence talked over snifters of brandy in the library while the comically small Christmas tree – Mr. Laurence’s concession to what he called _this nonsense season_ – winked with tiny candles in a corner well away from the bookcases.

Amy must have dozed off, still feeling hot and swollen and hoping she wouldn’t get birthing pains on Christmas Eve or Jo really would never let her live it down, and then Laurie was brushing her hair away from her face and touching his lips to the bridge of her nose.

“Come with me,” he told her. “You need to see something.”

Laurie preceded Amy into a room down the hall, which would serve as the nursery. Another wood-paneled room, a bit gloomy for a baby, but Amy noticed that Mr. Laurence had ordered new curtains in a lovely shade of yellow and chosen a few paintings from his collection that he knew she loved especially: a tiny jewel-like Fragonard showing a milk maid being courted by a handsome rake, a rather dark still life by Caravaggio (or as Laurie called him, feigning that he was lacking in education, Carpaccio)…

Laurie embraced her from behind while she admired the paintings hung above a mahogany sideboard holding an arrangement of diverse ornaments. He laid his hands on Amy’s belly and whispered in her ear: “Do you see it?”

 _See what_ , she started to reply, reluctantly abandoning the paintings so she could take in the rest of the décor. The sideboard held a porcelain Chinese girl with a parasol, a carved box, seven small silver elephants, a tall vase, a Venetian mirror…

The vase was oblong and wider at the top than at the bottom, glazed a rich honey yellow which always made Amy want to lick the glaze, with the rim and the bottom painted a complementary cobalt shading into the color of overripe plums. Mr. Rubinstein had produced three hundred of them, and another three hundred in a pale minty green with an ocher and orange rim and bottom, and advertised them as matching sets – _They match in their contrasts_ , he’d explained with a flourish – although the individual vases were also sold separately.

“Is that one of mine?” Amy whispered, though she knew perfectly well it was. She had her imitators in New York, but Mr. Laurence never would have bought a cheap knockoff. _He sent a signed note with Beth’s piano_ , Amy thought with a pang of shame at the momentary jealousy – Beth had been his special favorite, while his relationship with Amy was more tentative, a sort of familial courtship rather than the ease of mutual recognition.

She cleared her throat. “Do you think your grandfather is trying to tell us he knows about my work?”

Laurie pressed his cheek to hers, his narrow frame solid and warm behind her in a way she didn’t mind one bit, heavy and flushed as she was, her heart beating a martial tattoo in her chest, the baby kicking fiercely like she could feel her mother’s whirlpool emotions.

“I think he wants to be discreet, but he cannot conceal his affection or his approval,” Laurie replied. He kissed Amy’s ear. “Neither can I.”

“Oh Laurie.” Amy was seconds away from weeping – she knew it and she didn’t care if it made her look ugly. “I am so happy. I am so, so happy.”

She clung to her husband’s arms wrapped around her while he nuzzled her ear, her neck, her shoulder, and let herself be enveloped by that overheated, sumptuous house, the winter storm raging outside, and the colors of the objects before her – her vase, the Caravaggio, the Fragonard – blazing together like a midwinter bonfire before her tear-clouded eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> This is [Amy’s dinner outfit](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/William_McGregor_Paxton%2C_The_New_Necklace%2C_1910.jpg) – it’s from a later period, but I wanted to connect 1870s Amy with the early stirrings of Art Nouveau.


End file.
